Eurobike, which takes place at the beginning of September at the vast exhibition centre in Friedrichshafen, Germany, is the world’s most important cycle show. Virtually every major player in cycle manufacture is there along with many not so big, all of them wanting the kind of exposure that only comes with being present in front of the kind of audience such a show attracts.
Simply walking around the perimeter of the centre (and ignoring the Zeppelin hangar beside the runway of Friedrichshafen airport) takes around 10 minutes, while a thorough investigation of the 12 main halls takes, well, days…
Which means that it is easy to overlook some of the less glamorous stands. These might be offering anything from threaded fasteners produced in their millions to identikit carbon-fibre frames. My favourite so far is the Holland Mechanics stand, on which may be viewed several of the inordinately complex machines that build wire-spoked wheels.
They are not, in truth, pretty. They are not even particularly interesting to look at, the ultimate mysteries of their operation concealed behind myriad critical but anonymous small components. The machine taking pride of place at the front of the stand looked, to the uninformed onlooker, much like its fellows but is, I was told by Holland Mechanics’ Maarten van Doornik, state of the art.
Mainly this is because it has been built to work with the latest type of aluminium spoke nipple, which in addition to the conventional square flats on the inboard or hub side has a square head to be accessed from the rim trough. This head allows the application of much greater tightening torque during the building process without risk of shearing the aluminium nipple. Tighter spokes mean more durable wheels and the combination of the new spoke format and machines such as this one capable of finishing automatically a wheel assembled with them is the kind of technological advance that keeps costs down as performance improves.
Finishing a wheel? Another machine is needed to do the initial lacing and tensioning, this one bringing the wheel up to final tension and trueness. It does so in about one minute and, going by the spoke tension in the wheel sitting inside it, does indeed apply a very high tension. Given that the nipple-turning head will have a torque-sensor, it surely does so to a precise setting. And while it does the job automatically, there’s a big screen to let the operator know just what’s going on in there. Somewhere.
